Dissident Voice

May
5, 2003

When
the Bush administration totals up the cost of the Iraq War it had best be
prepared to tack on billions more to clean up the toxic residue of how this
country wages war, specifically its widespread use of cluster weapons and
Depleted Uranium (DU). While the shooting has wound down, the consequences of
using these controversial weapons will be around for a long time to come, with
clusters taking a steady toll on the unwary and the young, and DU poisoning the
air and water.

Cluster
munitions--bombs, shells, and rockets that release highly explosive canisters
that shred everything from people to tanks--have been an environmental
nightmare since the war in Southeast Asia. Of the 90 million cluster munitions
dropped on tiny Laos from 1964 to 1973, 30% failed to explode. The result is a
national minefield that has killed and maimed more than 12,000 people and which
continues to exact an annual toll of 100 to 200. In one 20 square kilometer
area, the British Mines Advisory Group, the world's leading bomb clearing
organization, recently found 376,000 unexploded weapons, the vast majority of
them cluster munitions. More than 50 million clusters were used in the 1991
Gulf War. In the two years following the war, they killed 1,400 Kuwaiti
civilians and, as late as last year, 200 cluster weapons were found there each
month.

According
to Colin King, the author of Jane's Explosive Ordinance Disposal Guide and a
disposal expert in Gulf War I, clusters caused "massive problems" in
Kosovo, the Gulf, and Afghanistan, and they are "going to cause massive
problems in the Gulf again." The most notorious cluster is the Vietnam era
"Rockeye," the CBU-99, armed with MK-118 bomblets, which have a
failure rate as high as 30%. A U.S. company hired to clear cluster weapons from
Kuwait found 95,700 unexploded MK-118 submunitions in one small area. More
recent cluster weapons, like the CBU-103, 104, 105, and AGM-154 A and B, have
better track records, but even these can fail anywhere from 5 - 23% of the
time. Children are particularly in danger because some of the canisters are
yellow, like the American emergency food packs.

The Ubiquity and Illegality of Depleted Uranium

Depleted
Uranium is ubiquitous on any recent American battlefield. The U.S. used 320
tons of it during the first Gulf War, and 10 tons of it in Kosovo. Its
resistance to enemy projectiles and its ability to turn hardened armor into
margarine gives the U.S. an enormous advantage over any opponent who lacks it.
It is, however, illegal. In August of last year, a United Nations subcommittee
found that the use of DU violated seven international agreements, including the
UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. Used in 120 mm tank shells and 30 mm
cannon ammunition, DU has an ignition threshold of 1132°C, one-third that of
tungsten. It can punch through four inches of steel, roasting the inside of
tanks and armored vehicles with a 10,000°C fireball.

Anywhere
from 30% to 70% of DU turns into tiny dust particles, which may travel as far
as 40 kilometers. DU is not very radioactive--about the same as naturally
occurring uranium--but if ingested, according to the U.S. Environmental Policy
Institute, it "has the potential to generate significant medical
consequences." DU has long been a suspect in Gulf War Syndrome, the mélange
of physical woes afflicting up to 30% of the veterans from the 1991 conflict.
The Department of Defense doesn't consider low-level radiation a threat, but a
recent study by the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute may force a
reevaluation of that conclusion. "People have always assumed low doses are
not much of a problem," Alexandra Miller of the Institute told The
Guardian (British), "but they can cause more damage than people
think." The study indicates that DU damages bone marrow chromosomes.

The
effects of low-level radiation are hard to track, because many
"solid" cancers don't show up for 16 to 24 years. However, Iraqi
medical authorities claim the cancer rate in the Basra area has jumped
ten-fold. The area was saturated with DU during the 1991 war. Besides being
radioactive, DU is also a toxic metal that can damage kidneys and livers.
Another worry are DU "misses," where the enormous weight and speed of
DUs drive them as deep as 24 inches into the ground. "A major concern of
the potential environmental effects by intact [DU] penetrators or large
penetrator fragments," notes the World Health Organization, "is the
potential contamination of ground water after weathering." Cluster bomb
and DU cleanup is likely to be enormously expensive, and who pays for it will
be a major question.

Who
Will Pay for the Clean Up?

The
Bush administration is depending on Iraqi oil sales to foot most of the bill.
But the figures don't add up. At most, Iraqi oil could bring in $18 billion a
year, barely enough to feed the 60% of the population dependent on food
handouts. Nor does this even address rebuilding the country's infrastructure,
ravaged by 12 years of sanctions and the recent war, a price tag that,
according to PFC Energy, a Washington consulting firm, will probably run in
excess of $300 billion.

Iraq
also has a debt burden that may be as high as $383 billion, and no one seems to
be stepping forward to write it off. Indeed, the Financial Times called Deputy
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's call for debt cancellation,
"mischievous." As Russian Vice Premier and Finance Minister Alexei
Kudrin pointed out, no one forgave his country's enormous debts.

Unlike
in Gulf War I, where the allies picked up most the tab, the Bush
administration's "Coalition of the Willing" is flat broke, and the
White House has only allotted $2.4 billion to the Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance. On top of that, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
and the World Bank have been hesitant to step in without United Nations
authority.

In
part, the IMF is nervous about getting into the business of cleaning up after
the American military. "I don't see that for the long-term future you can
keep together a world of peace and prosperity just based on military
might," IMF Managing Director Horst Köhler told the Financial Times.

In
the end it will likely be Iraqi civilians and U.S. occupation troops who will
pay the price for the way we choose to wage war.

Conn Hallinan is a journalism
lecturer and provost at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and a
political analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org).
He can be contacted at: connm@cats.ucsc.edu